


A Dalton Boy

by notenoughtogivebread



Series: Klaine Advent 2014 [15]
Category: Glee
Genre: Dalton Academy, Depression, Episode: s06e05 The Hurt Locker: Part 2, Klaine Break-Up, M/M, Memories of Assault, Past Infidelity, Season/Series 06, Therapy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-05
Updated: 2015-04-05
Packaged: 2018-04-12 14:20:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,252
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4482548
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notenoughtogivebread/pseuds/notenoughtogivebread
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for Klaine Advent 2014: Blaine overthinks; set after The Hurt Locker.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Dalton Boy

Blaine loved his office off the undergrad commons. He loved its high ceilings and gorgeous woodwork, loved the tall windows looking out over the Dalton grounds. It was a place to withdraw to—door open, always, for any boy who might need an understanding ear—but still a place that was HIS. His days were so busy, with private lessons scheduled throughout the school days and thrice-weekly after-school practices, that he cherished his moments of free time.

During those times that belonged to no one but himself, he found that he was drawn to the piano in his office. The words written in the journal Dr. Patel had been having him keep had this way of dancing around in his mind sometimes and coming out as songs. He had folders of compositions tucked into the desk here, some that he never needed to revisit anymore, others that had become his steady companions. When he told her, she encouraged him to do that, to sift through them and see the ones that had served their purpose as a part of him getting better, but to also listen to what the others were saying to him.

On the Monday after the insanity that was Sue Sylvester’s invitational, one of these songs played on in his head as he stood at the window looking out over the grounds. It murmured in the background as he planned what to say to the group at rehearsal, how to set his talented crew back on their feet and ready for the competition season after the strange weekend. It was ironic, really, that he’d be humming a song about leaving the past behind while his head was so full of his own past—and Kurt—again.

After a weekend locked in a darkened theater—and a bogus elevator—it was a relief to look out on brilliant autumn sunshine. It was the peak of leaf season, the gold of the sycamores along the drive into campus set off by the reds of the sugar maples and the bronze of the oaks. Looking across the grounds, he followed with his eyes the path that led past his favorite copper beech, now gilded with deep orange. And just like that, he was carried to that past again.

He recalled lazy afternoons sitting with his friends under that tree, their books open around them, talking of weekend plans and football games. It was one of the first places he took Kurt on campus, one Saturday before the other boy actually came—escaped—to Dalton. He traced the path further; he could just catch a glimpse of the sun sparkling on the water at the end of it—the boys called it The Lake, but it was really just a farm pond that the caretaker kept dredged, the site of ice skating and ridiculous dragon boat races, of romantic trysts with Crawford girls in the shelter of the canoe racks. On that long ago Saturday, a group of the guys, curious to get to know Blaine’s new friend, tumbled down that path, Jeff piggybacking Nick, Trent blushing as he tried to talk fashion with Kurt, Blaine himself trailing behind running his hands over seedheads of the tall grass by the path’s edge. He remembered thinking as they approached the pond, how proud he was of this refuge and glad to share it and his Dalton pals with Kurt. He smiled recalling Kurt surprising them all by besting even Nick at skipping stones; his ex had gained more admirers that day. Blaine didn’t know how Kurt had never noticed Trent’s regard back then…well, _now_ he knew that Kurt had been crushing on him just as hard. God, adolescence is messy, he thought.

A breeze caught the branches of the beech and a shower of leaves fell, carpeting the ground around it, covering the spot where he and Kurt had buried Pavarotti. What had he said that day, so sure in the first flush of love? “We got each other out of this. That beats a lousy trophy, don’t you think?” His mood darkened; in the end, winning Blaine hadn’t made up for the loss of the trophy for Kurt, since within a week he was gone from Dalton, taking his chance at that shiny Nationals prize. He closed his eyes and rested his head against the window, but the images came anyway: Kurt walking away, leaving him behind at Dalton; walking across the stage in his red graduation gown, leaving Ohio for New York; always leaving, walking toward his future, head up, spine straight, not daring to look back. Blaine knew that’s how it had been, but it was still true that not looking back meant not seeing that Blaine was faltering, meant not waiting for Blaine to catch up.

He turned away from the view and tried to get his breathing under control, willing the thoughts crowding his head to go away. He tried to get back on track, back to Dalton and his band of overachievers. But he was spiraling down, down into memories of that cold night in Battery Park and the anguish his weakness and betrayal caused. And then crashing into the wall that Kurt had built up carefully, brick by brick, so as to never feel that anguish again. How foolish he’d been to think that they could just wish it away.

Damn! His gaze drifted over the room as he was assaulted by the failures, and by the feelings about himself, those ugly words: controlling, clingy, liar, cheater, failure, dropout. His eye fell on the journal on his desk, and he heard Dr. Patel’s voice. “You may not be able to make those thoughts go away. But they don’t have to be your focus. Try to think of them as just another thing in the room with you.”

Clinging to the windowsill, he closed his eyes again, and let the flow of images come. He wasn’t sure if this was what she meant, but it worked for him. He let them become a giant wave, and he rode over it, his eyes on the horizon, just guiding his surfboard to safety, feeling the sun on his face. Now the bitter memories of Kurt turning from him, fending him off, shutting him out were just more curls and drops to navigate. The arguments that seemed to spring from nothing, the silent bed, the laughter and conversations that stopped when he entered the room—just sea foam. The fear of drowning, of losing himself, of never being enough, he rode through, adjusting his weight, finding his line of balance. He was drained as he ground to a halt on the beach, Kurt smiling at him from the wings of the McKinley stage. He opened his eyes, back in the lovely office, walked shakily to sit at his desk, and picked up the red Moleskine journal there, paging back to June and the start.

It was getting easier to see all of this as his past, not as a constant part of Being Blaine. When he first started trying, he’d told Dr. Patel that he just wanted not to think these things, because he knew that they weren’t fair, not really, not fair to himself and not fair to Kurt, no matter how angry he was. She’d suggested that maybe he shouldn’t lock them away from himself, that it might help to put them in his journal. So they were all recorded here. There was a particularly vicious group of entries written just after a frustrating week of Tina trying to draw him out of the house. God, he’d been such a bad friend to her. He read through those entries, the poisonous hate and jealousy, the feelings of abandonment just oozing across the pages.

“I don’t see how writing all this down helps. I don’t really hate him, you know,” he’d insisted that week in the counselor’s office.

“Maybe. And maybe it’s seeing those thoughts put down on paper that lets you know that,” she said.

“And the things about _me_ in there?”

“Those too, Blaine.”

Out in the hall, the clock chimed 2. The boys of the council—well, Alec Pfiester at least—would be coming at 2:30 to prep for the meeting. His alone time was drawing to an end. He replaced the book in his satchel and ducked into the next room to grab a drink from the water cooler.

A group of boys—second-formers, from the looks of them–were rehearsing their Shakespeare memorizations at the end of the room. He stood up with his cup of water as a slight, dark boy took his turn: “Friends, Romans, Countrymen, Lend me your ears…” The boy saw him watching and stumbled to a halt. “I’m sorry, Mr. A. Were we disturbing you?”

“No, no. You’re fine. I actually—the Warblers council is meeting with me in a bit, and I thought I’d warm up on my piano. Should I close the door so I don’t disturb your studies?”

They tumbled all over themselves like puppies in their eagerness to put him at ease. God, they were so young—the age he was when he first set foot on Dalton’s grounds, gun-shy and awkward, his leg still splinted. That had been a rough time, the roughest—well, before this year.

And it had been one hell of a year, he thought, as he returned to sit at the piano. He could barely imagine himself as one of those 13-year-old boys in their ill-fitting blazers, true, but it was almost as hard to picture that he was also the hope-filled, anxious boy who crowded into the loft with Kurt and Rachel and Santana and Sam. He had learned so much about himself in the months just past, and it had been a help, really, to try to think clearly of his future without complicating it with his messed-up love life. Maybe that was why when the music came back, it came like this.

He had played with songwriting with sweet little Marley, but he never took it seriously as something he could do on his own. And like her, he hadn’t found it in him to show the compositions to anyone yet—well, except Dr. Patel. Maybe for a time, it would still be something just for him, a private language.

There was another new tune playing in his head. This one had no words; instead, the gentle melody and minor chords that flowed from his hands were a soundtrack to his jumbled feelings in the elevator. It’s funny, he had thought he would be coming back to that kiss, but talking to Dave last night, and just everything else on his mind (including his sense of outrage at that damn Sue Sylvester) had pushed that away. It was a good kiss, a complicated kiss, but it really _didn’t_ have to mean anything. No, it was the rest of it that he was reaching to capture with the song: the sniping and snarking, the laughter and the sharing of food, the talk, the nearness of Kurt’s sharp intelligence and lovely person.

He had missed his friend—that was it. And there were stretches of time in their tiny prison when he was sure they could fix this, that the past could just be a story they could grow a new friendship from. Because he wanted to be friends with Kurt. With the smiling guy carefully hiding the wine bottle in the bathroom “to avoid temptation, Blaine. That could get ugly, fast.” (“C’mon, there’s no Rachel here to play Spin the Bottle with.”) And the wistful elf who could tease and tell stories with the best of them—Kurt was so good to spend time with.

The song needed a bridge, and it was there that he stumbled. Everything he came up with sounded too romantic, too sweeping and soaring. He wanted to keep it grounded, wanted the song to sound like his life—accepting and content. He needed to find a phrase that could capture the tenderness he’d felt watching Kurt sleep, all curled up around his makeshift pillow, his sweet hands tucked close, that sarcastic mouth soft as a child’s in his slumber. But underneath that tenderness lay a yearning, a complex longing all tangled up with the same feeling of protectiveness that got them in trouble in the first place. Of _course_ he loved Kurt, of course he found him almost impossibly beautiful, but he wasn’t so sure he loved the Blaine who was so devoted to Kurt that he lost himself.

He hesitated, poised to scratch through the bars of the bridge on his staff paper. Maybe it would be okay like this, though. He remembered a few sessions back, he was trying to tell Dr. Patel a story, and he wanted so to get it right, he’d kept doubling back and adding qualifiers, knotting himself all up, and losing the thread of the tale. She’d stopped him, smiled, and said, “Maybe if we tried for less perfection and more, just honest emotion, it would come easier.”

So he left the bridge as it was, played through the tune one more time, then put it aside to play some scales. The boys would be here any minute now, and he had to put his game face on—well, that, and actually try to explain Sue Sylvester to them. He could always return to the song. But right now, his Warblers—and Dalton—needed him.

**Author's Note:**

> The last entry in the Klaine Advent Challenge--A Zig-Zag Line--is a companion piece to this.


End file.
